Again working on the classic problem of making bit perfect audio CD rips on Linux (Ubuntu 15.04). Quite amazing that in the year 2015 this would still come up, now when CD as a format is nearly deprecated. Couple of days ago I re-published my guide from 2013 regarding .cue/.flac recording, which mentions the usage of Exact Audio Copy (EAC) on Wine. However this does not seem to be as straight forward as it used to be, after a couple of EAC upadates (see: Ubuntu forums thread)

Luckily for audio ripping the open source community has produced a high quality Linux native solution. Meet morituri, a simple CLI audio ripper. While the user interface is purely command line driven, this is a very simple tool to work with and the package is available in Ubuntu repositories.

Insert a popular CD that is in good condition, and use it to find your drive’s read offset. Morituri will perform a test rip and compare the results to the AccurateRip online database. Therefore it is recomenned to use a popular/common disc, and not some garage band demo.

In the end morituri will report the offset of your drive - make a note of it. In my case the read offset is 48.

Now you are ready to rip your CDs with bit perfect quality!

rip cd rip --offset (offset)

Replace the (offset) with the numeric value reported by morituris offset detection process, fox example 48 in my case. This command will produce a copy of the CD in losslessly compressed FLAC format into \Album\ folder of your home directory. Morituri has a number of additional parameter you can use. As an example you can use different audio formats for the resulting files.

I am the process of ripping my whole CD collection to FLAC format using morituri. Overall the application has worked very well, but there seems to be a bug regarding discs that cannot be matched to the MusicBrainz database.

By default morituri will halt if the disc cannot be identified. Unfortunately it seems that the MusicBrainz lacks of lot of titles that are found in the FreeDB database, but morituri insists on using the former (due to better data quality). According to morituri documentation the optio -U should allow ripping of unidentified discs - in my case the command would be:

rip cd rip -U --offset 48

This however only produces an error message when the disc is unidentfied by MusicBrainz…

AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'discid'

Currently I am planning to work this around by using EAC (under Wine) for those unindentified discs, by modifying the EAC’s file naming convention to match morituri’s.

Worked for me on Ubuntu 16.04 when I installed from source and tweaked a bit.
Watch out that neither nemo nor nautilus nor another program is automounting the cd drive.
Both morituri and abcde gave error messages like ‘no tracks found’, until I figured how to
turn automounting of the drive off so morituri could access the drive without interference.

Using Whipper

The syntax of using Whipper is currently the same as with Morituri, but they changed the command from rip to whipper. There for the basic commands for usage are:

whipper offset find
whipper cd rip

The Whipper seems to have fixed a bug of morituri not storing or reading the offset value from configuration file. At least on my Manjaro Linux the offset find value is now correctly stored and read when performing a cd rip.